Iwan Serrurier (21 September 1878 in

Leiden Leiden (; in English and archaic Dutch also Leyden) is a city and municipality in the province of South Holland, Netherlands. The municipality of Leiden has a population of 119,713, but the city forms one densely connected agglomeration wit ...

– 1953) was a Dutch-born

electrical engineer Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

notable for inventing the Moviola.

Career

Iwan was the son of Lindor Serrurier, director of the ethnographic museum in

, and Martina Lindo. In June 1903, Serrurier married Catharina Damme in

Utrecht Utrecht ( , , ) is the List of cities in the Netherlands by province, fourth-largest city and a List of municipalities of the Netherlands, municipality of the Netherlands, capital and most populous city of the Provinces of the Netherlands, pro ...

,Genealogical archives of Utrecht
/ref> soon after which they moved to the US and settled in

Pasadena, California Pasadena ( ) is a city in Los Angeles County, California, northeast of downtown Los Angeles. It is the most populous city and the primary cultural center of the San Gabriel Valley. Old Pasadena is the city's original commercial district. I ...

. Here their son

Mark Mark may refer to: Currency * Bosnia and Herzegovina convertible mark, the currency of Bosnia and Herzegovina * East German mark, the currency of the German Democratic Republic * Estonian mark, the currency of Estonia between 1918 and 1927 * Fi ...

was born in May 1904. Serrurier sold real estate and worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad as a draftsman. Around 1917 Serrurier developed a home movie projector, which he called the "Moviola" since it was a similar concept to a Victrola. The device was hard to sell to home users since it cost $600 in 1920, a very large sum. An editor at Douglas Fairbanks Studios suggested that Serrurier should adapt the device for use by

film editors A film also called a movie, motion picture, moving picture, picture, photoplay or (slang) flick is a work of visual art that simulates experiences and otherwise communicates ideas, stories, perceptions, feelings, beauty, or atmosphere ...

; he did this and the Moviola as an editing device was born in 1924. In 1946 Iwan Serrurier's son

Mark Serrurier Mark Serrurier (12 May 1904 in Pasadena, California – 14 February 1988) is the son of Dutch-born electrical engineer, Iwan Serrurier, who created the Moviola in 1924 which became the technology used for film editing. Mark was a graduate of Ca ...

took over as president of Moviola Co., Iwan's company. In 1979 Mark was awarded a special

Academy Award for Technical Achievement The Technical Achievement Award is one of three Scientific and Technical Awards given from time to time by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. (The other two awards are the Scientific and Engineering Award and the Academy Award of Me ...

for himself and Iwan Serrurier for their special contribution to movie editing.

References

Moviola.com – What is the Moviola story?

External links

{{DEFAULTSORT:Serrurier, Iwan 1878 births 1953 deaths Academy Award for Technical Achievement winners American mechanical engineers Cinema pioneers Dutch emigrants to the United States Dutch mechanical engineers People from Leiden